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Ogrien R. Lindsley. t.!e moaing force behind precision teacbing, gaoecredit to tbe metbod:s *nu"rriorr,,n n;, jr){*;;;;;;;; "iir'i*rra

,n,c hange s ma de in SkinnTryo o lr,rr"; ;;; ;;;;;;;;';;;; ;;;" i r * nl:o*nq: as tbey moaed from'tbe taboratory to tbe classroom.Scientific terminologr iowly gaae -ol ,o precise common Englisbtbat eaerc first gradei ,lortioi ort tni* ,io bebaaiar could easilyunderstund. Lindsley olso stissed tbe i:mportance of thoseimm e diate ty ina o ta i d i" " rirg i; ;;; ;, n' te a c n ing_e x ce p ti o natcbildren and tbeir barents an-d'teacbers_in makkg iii.r"rriot, ,rae!(lttoe tec.bniqui lnsteoa of a;r;;;, laboratory metbod. ,,we,ue

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Something Else Kind of Thing

SOURCES AND ?RODUCERS OFPRECISION TEACHING

Excepttonal children, teachers, andparents produced precision

teachtng.

SKTNNER'S STR,{ TEGIESRETAINED

The behaver knows best.

Frequency is a behilvioralcomp&re*all.

tl The source of precision teaching, of course, is the operant condi-tioning methods developed in the laboratory. But the real producersof precision teaching as a unique method are in special education.They are exceptional children and their teachers. lf those childrenhad not been able to communicate their skills and abilities and needs,and if their support personnel had not let the information come fromchild to teacher to me, I would not have had the information whichforced us to change some of the strategies of operant conditioningand behavior modification into precision teaching techniques. I alsowant to say that one of the strqng things that made me decide toleave the laboratory and go into education was the work of Sid Bijouin his lab preschools in Seattle. He had done some very interesting,very exciting work which led me to believe that maybe we couldstudy children learning in their natural environment and that wedidn't need to put them in a box, cell, or laboratory. I'd also like togive credit here to Ted Ayllon and Eric Haughton and their work inshaping up the behavior of chronic psychotics in Saskatchewan-

I Remembering that teachers and children are the real source ofprecision teaching, we must go back a little in history to Skinner whodeveloped operant conditioning. From his work we derive severalstrategies. First and most important: the child knows best. Skinnersaid the rat knows best because it was the rat's behavior he wasstudying. This is the principle we apply to people. The teacher knowsbest if we are talking about teacher behavior, but the child knowsbest if we are talking about child behavior.

The second important thing we get from operant conditioning isrecording the frequency of behavior. Skinner called it rate, but we'vehad trouble with that word because the general public does notrealize that it means "number of behaviors divided by the time ittook to count it." Thirdly, standard charting (a cumulative responserecord) and its efficiency were Skinner's hallmark. Skinner himselfsaid in 1968, "My major contributions are rate of response and thecumulative response recorder. "

The concept of rate or frequency is important to us because it is abehavior compare-all or "universal datum" in Skinner's words. Youcan't find a behavior which has no frequency, which means you cancompare any two behaviors using freguency. We found recently thatchanges in frequency over weeks (celeration) are also universal andeasy to pt from our daily behavior chart- So acceleration is a learn-ing or behavior change in frequency. We can compare, for example,the acceleration in dressing produced by smiling at a retarded childwith the acceleration in algebra produced by a slight change in themathematics curriculum of a gifted teenager. And we can say thatthe rewarding smile for the retarded child was one half as accelera-ting as the curriculum change for the teenager. Thus we can numeri-

cally measure differences in improvement between children or be-

tween curricula or between school districts-It is only a small step from an objective acceleration number to

compare child improvement to dividing it by the cost in dollars and

we have our product statement for cost-benefit budgeting and thePPBE system. Using the same charts that children and teachers use toimprove classroom teaching decisions for budget planning will savp

districts lots of money by getting two birds with one stone' Costlyregular examinations will no longer be necessary.

So we've retained from operant conditioning the strategy of look-ing at frequency in multiples and the strategy of self-charting- Skin'ner used to say that we've got to externalize behavior and get it onthe recorder. "lt should be noted that at no point does the experi-menter intervene for purposes of interpretation." Thus you have noobserver reliability problem. Another important element of the lab-

oratory developed techniques was to record exactly what we manipu-lated or reinforced. ln the lab that might mean the payoff electricalcircuit should go exactly to the microswitch which does the record-ing- That is important in classroom measurement. We should recordexactly what we reward and are trying to teach-

Another detail df self-recording we've retained from Skinner is aninterest in inner behaviors. He called them "private events" and saidtheir functions and laws were no different from those for outerbehavior. He hadn't studied inner behaviors, he said, because hehadn't yet discovered a way to record them. People, however, as

opposed to rats and pigeons, can record their own inner behaviorsmuch the same way they record their own outer behaviors. Continu-ous and complete monitoring is very important for both. UnitedAirlines has computers continually tape recording characteristics oftheir planes in flight. They call this "predictive maintenance." Whena carburetor-or a child-is heading for trouble, continuous monitor-ing gives early warning. Continuous monitoring of behavior frequen-cy was the rule in laboratory operant conditioning- Description rath-er than explanation was the strategy.

This leads us to descriptive or functtorul definitions, one of Skin-ner's major conceptual contributions. For example, Skinner func-tionally defined reinforcement- By putting an adjective describingthe effect before the noun describing the procedure you can easilyseparate function from procedure in basic English. This is the easiestway to share this important distinction with children, parents, andteachers- You can have effective signals or ineffective signals, acceler-ating signals and decelerating signals, frequency multiplying arrange-ments, and celeration multiplying curricula. And you can also haverewarding rewards, ineffective rewards, or punishing rewards. lf youattempt to reward and the behavior decreases, like it or not, youhave a punishing reward IFigure 1].

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Skinner to Precision Teaching

Frequency c$n be imPortont tothe Business Office toa.

Self-chorting provides a record ofinner beltavior.

Continuous and completemonitoring gives eorly warning.

Functional definitio ns :e.g. the "punishing rewsrd. "

Something Else Kind of Thing

Flgure 1. The Punishing Beward: M&MsDecelerate Desired Behavior

BEHAVIOR BUILDINTG

The behaver gaes at hts ownfrequeftcy dnd celeration...

Using our language more precisely, we separate what we did fromwhat we had planned to do. We can distinguish our results from ourhopes and thus reduce confusion in sharing our classroom experien-ces.tr We have also retained behavior building. Almost all of early oper-ant conditioning involved demonstrations. ln the early fifties wecompelled attention by demonstrations of exceptional skill in prodrc-ing dramatic and unusual behavior. We synthesized behavior in mak-ing pigeons play ping-pong. We did not analyze behavior into itsparts, or succeed in finding what part of a rat was most important toits figuring out how to run through a maze. We produced behavior;we did not analyze it.

It was skill in producing behavior that convinced the pioneers.What made me an early operant conditioner was that only onemonth after learning the method, I was able to learn from SamsonRat how to teach him to lift over 250 percent of his own bodyweight in only four days of training. Skinner knew this and used tosay, "The animals make operant conditioners; I don'1."

We should also remember that in free operant conditioning thebehaver is free to behave at any momertt. There are no triais {as thereare in controlled operant conditioning), just learning or class periods.

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The pigeon in his chamber or the child in her classroom can go as fastand as far as their abilities permit-all limits are theirs alone.

Another important point which is often overlooked is personal-ized procedures. Skinner and l, he a full professor and I his graduatestudent, once spent a whole Saturday hunting for a special kind ofmillet for a pigeon that wasn't performing at as high a frequency as

other pigeons. Our searching for millet to fit this particular pigeon-RGY-32-was like the School Superintendent and a student teacherdriving 200 miles on a weekend to find a unique curriculum forkooky Tommy. And I think this is the most important element toretain . . . different strokes for different folks!fl There are certain elements of laboratory operant conditioning wehad to prune away to develop precision teaching. We had to abandonthe isolated environment of the laboratory. As I said before, this wasBijou's and Ayllon's and Haughton's contribution, to bring us lawfuldata from classrooms and wards.

Secondly we had to abandon deprivation. Although technicallyfeasible, it is immoral to teach children by placing them in closetsand depriving them of lunch, when rearranging their curricula wouldbe as effective and less costly.

Also, we had to abandon synthetic or extrinsic consequences,except in emergencies, as too costly and unnecessary. Occasionallyextrinsic rewards backfired and produced deceleration-actually be-ing punishing rewards as shown with the M&M candy in Figure 1.

And again in the classroom improvement project shown in Figure2, we see that "the child knows best." l, as supervisor, and MikeDixon, the advisor, suggested a piece of M&M candy as a reward foreach numeral said correctly by Rodney, a 6 year old boy bearing thelabel "emotionally disturbed." Under this "reward" his correct fre-quency divided by 1.5 each week-deceleration! A punishing reward!

The next person to try a helping procedure was his teacher, whosuggested a star for each numeral said correctly. At first, the use ofstars multiplied his frequency by 2, but as the week of stars went on,that frequency divided by 1.5. Rodney worked twice as fast, but hewas losing interest at the same deceleration!

As is so often tragically the case, the last to be asked for sugges-tions was the behaver, Rodney. With a gleam in his eye, Rodney said,"What I would like best is when I finish my lesson, you talk to me a

bit." This multiplied his freq.renry of numerals said correctly by 3.Oand his celeration or growth by 2-Al

After many experiences like this it became clear that if we wereto remain scientists we must stop advising teachers to use conseguen-ces which are not part of the classroom, and urge our teachers to getsuggestions from their children. With our charts to guide us we haveno fear; the data tell us when we are going in the wrong--or right-di-rection.

Skinner to Precision Teaching

,. -ond has persorrdlized procedures.

SOME LAB TECHNIQUES

ABANDONED

Extrinsic rewards relegated toemergency procedures only.

Stop ustltg consequences whiclt arenot port of tlre classroom; getsugg€stions from the children.

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Something Else Kind of Thing

Figure 2. The Behaver Chooses His Ouun

Beward

SIMPLIFYTNG THE LANGUAGE

We also had to abandon mechanical recording- ln 1965, inShawnee Mission, Kansas, we suryeyed a group of teachers to findout what classroom behavior they wanted us to work on most. lm-mediately, you see, we had ruled out the children. The teachers weremost bothered, they said, by talkouts and secondly by childrenjumping out of their seats. Harold Kunzelmann developed an auto-matic recorder to screw on the bottom of the seats to record thenumber of times weight came off the chair. To get baseline data,teachers started counting and charting out-of-seats before the boxeswere installed. The problem was that many of the teachers got rid ofthe out-of-seat behavior before Harold could get out to their class-rooms with his recorders. So there were two alternatives: to hold upteachers while we screwed on gadgets and published on hhaviorsthat could be mechanically recorded or to become classroom teacheroriented and work with teachers and their skills and needs. So outwent mechanical recording.tr The next thing that had to go was laboratory jargon- The languageof operant conditioning is confusing and difficult. lt is not precise-And for self-charting, we needed terms in basic English so thatsecond and third graders would know what we were talking about.

Our first signal that we should pay attention to "the child knowsLaboratory iargon iust hod to go.

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best" happened in a classroom. We had a chart of thumb-sucks by a12 year old boy labeled "emotionally disturbed." He was tallying hisown thumbsucking, but in 1966 we didn't realize how importantself-recording was, so we didn't make much of it. The thumb-suckswere accelerating on the chart before any changes were made toimprove the situation. Since it was worsening, Martin Bisaha, theteacher, said, "Why don't you use this to decelerate your thumQ-sucking?" And the little boy took the role of scotch tape fromMartin's hand and put a piece over his well sucked thumb- The chartshowed a rapid deceleration of thumbsucking produced by the self-applied tape. One day Martin forgot to put out the tape roll and theboy came to him and said, "May I have my little helper?"

When Martin told me this in a teacher training class a few nightslater, I thought, Wow! lf the child knows best what it means to him,ure can't call it a punisher. lt's a helper, a reminder. lt's not a hurter,not a punisher. That was one of the very first clues we got that weshould change some of our words and look more closely, more pre-cisely at what people say about their own behavior.

This going from our beloved laboratory jargon to precise commonEnglish was very difficult and took years. The process is still goingon. I think it is so hard because it involves changing our own thoughtprocesserhow we have ben taught, at great expense, to perceivethings. Here are some other examples of the changes we made.

We gave up "rate" in favor of "frequency" because peoplethought we meant quality (rating sheet) or value (first rate) or speed(which is distance over time). Freguency is much less misunderstood.Also some teachers, when they heard the word rate, felt all we weretrying to do was increase reading speed instead of both accuracy andcomprehension.

When we referred to "steep and shallow slopes" of the frequencylines on our standard chart, many thouqht it had something to dowith skiing. Also we had trouble separating "up-slopes" from "dcnvn-slopes-" Now we talk of "acceleration" and "deceleration" whichare more easily connected with changes in frequency by most of us.

Discussing a logarithmic scale scared many and confused the rest,so we went to "ratio scale" which only helped a portion of us. We'verecently found that the best word for elementary teachers and chil-dren is "multiply-divide"scale (Figure 3)- As you go up the left of thechart by egual distances, you multiply the numbers by equalamounts or factors. lf you come down by equal jumps, you aredividing by equal amounts at each jump- This seems to tie in betterwith people's ordinary vocabulary and the elementary math curricu-lum-

We began by describing the parts of the chart by the method wehad last learned-formal mathematics. Thus what went up the left wecalled the ordinate and what went across the bottom was the aF

Skinner to Precision Teaching

Are decelerating confequences notpunishers but really kelpers?

Look more closely at what peoplesay about their own behavtor.

Sorne people thought logarithmswere dancing logs!

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Something Else Kind of Thing

Flgure 3. The Multiply-Divide ScaXe

Simplifies Reading the Behavior Chart

We begon describing the portsof tke chart by formol

matheynatics. - .and hada lot of trouble

teachtng it-

We were broug?tt back to precisebasics by our children ond

teachers.

scissa. And we had a lot of trouble teaching the chart- Then twoyears ago, we heard Stephanie Bates, a 5 year old kindergartenerteaching the chart to others in her class, say, "See the dark blue linesthat go up and down. They are Sunday lines- All the lines that go upand down are day lines." She was telling what you see and what youdo on the chart. You put a dot where the Sunday line crosses theone-per-minute line if you did something once in a minute on Sun-day.

We had been remembering our plane geometry and not payingattention to what we did on the chart. ln exactly this way we aban-doned the abstractions we had learned and were brought back toprecise basics by our children and teachers.

We went from "operant level," which was our old laboratoryword for what the behavior frequency was before you rewarded it, to"base-line" and finally to the simple "before." A similar simplifica-tion trip was from "experimental conditions" or "independent vari-able" to"intervention" to "during," as in during SRA level 2.5 orduring five minutes of listening to language tapes for each 1O mathproblems correct. "Extinction," which described taking out the pro-cedure to see if the effect was durable and confusingly also describedthe disappearance of the effect if it was not durable, became merely"after. "

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There was even difficulty with the name of our whole system- ln

the Midraest, the most corRmon response to the words "free operantconditioning" was that it was a way of waterproofing shoes- We

didn't want to have to unteach shoe waterproofing so we went to"behavior modification." Many parents said that didn't say anything.They thought we were saying, "We are going to modify your child'sbehavioi by behavior modification." That meant nothing to them.Thinking that what was really new in our procedure was precision,

we decided to use that as an adjective in front of whatever it was one

was doing: hence, in our case, "precision teaching.""Subject" was our first word for the person whose behavior was

being charted or improved. lts most common meaning is "one who isplaced under the authority, dominion, control, or influence of some-

thing else. One who is bound in servitude to a feudal superior; a

vassal." Since we didn't want to vassalize children, that had to go. So

for several years we used the term "protege" for the person whose

behavior was being charted and improved. ln an inservice workshopin Hibbing, Minnesota, a lovely teacher told me at the coffee break,"Dr. Lindsley, that word protege is too high-brow, it just has to go!Find a word that has something to do with behavior." So I got thecourage to search again, and it was like a breath of fresh air when we

discovered the word "behaver."We had to discard the word "reinforcer" along the way. This also

hurt because the word was introduced to the academic communityby my dearly beloved teacher, B. F. Skinner, and was one of our oldhallmarks. Regretably though, to most practitioners the most com-mon meaning was "bridge abutment." ln the plural it produced "mil-itary troops" as the most common understanding. Awkwardly weplayed around with "accelerating conseguence" for a while, but it is

hard to say and harder to teach. I think that now, with our chartsand 12,OOO behavior improvement projects stored in the BehaviorBank's computers, we have enough hard science to be secure enoughto talk like people again. We can start using basic English preciselywith functional adjectives like effective reward, untried consequence,punishing reward, and rewarding punishment-

The term "pinpoint" was suggested by Ed Sabastian, one of thefathers in our first parents'class in 1965. The class was rapidly beingturned off by my scientif ic jargon. Pinpoints are the things you haveselected to count in behavior improvement projects. As Ed said,"You pinpoint a behavior for action." And the things you use tochange behavior we now call simply "procedures" or "changes."

"Experimentally analyze" was a term dear to my heart, for I hadbeen a victor in the academic war that introduced the term to profes-sionals. But our teachers didn't want to experiment and they don'tlike to analyze. And to make matters worse, the things we calledexperimental analyses (note the difficult plural spelling) were neither

Skinner to Precision Teaching

What is really new in our sYstem fsprecision.

We now have enough hard scienceto be secure enough to talk tikepeople Lgnin.

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true experiments nor analyses in the strict laboratory sense. ln labor-atories you pay thousands for the controls required for true experi-ment and analysis.

So we talked about "pragmatically selecting" things for a briefwhile and soon translated that into my grandmother's law: "Try,tryagain." As Grandmother Lindsley used to say, "Ogden, you will notat first succeed, so you just try, and try again-" Figure I shows twoof these tries: the M&M's and the marks on the child's hand. Figure 2shows three tries: the M&M's, the stars, and the talk at the end ofthe lesson.

To cover briefly a few more changes in terminology, we wentfrom "private events" to "mental events" to "inner behavior," andfrom "public events" to "physical behavior" to "outer behavior."From "self-control," which implies a false duality, we went to "per-sonal manapment."tr So these were some of the ways we dispensed with our laboratoryjargon and still kept our priceless concepts alive, but now in a morecommunicable form. This gave us our four steps to success: pin-point, chart daily, change something, and try, try again. Mix themwell with your humor and love, and your children's successes will beyours.

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Skinner to Precision Teaching

Grandmother Lindsley's law: Try,try ogain.

PRECISION TEACHINGCONCEPTS.. ALIVE ANDCOMIvTUNICABLE

Four steps to success: pinpoint,chart, change, and t/y, try again-wtth love.